Technological Innovations of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolution

David Zillig, Chris Tussing

Patterns of Industrialization

Industrialization- a process that transformed agrarian and handicraft-centered economies into economies distinguished by industry and machine manufacture.

Technological advancements were critical to the industrial revolution and made it possible to produce goods by machine rather than by hand. The machines ran on "inanimate" sources of energy such as coal and petroleum. Factories became the predominant site of industrial production in Europe, the U.S.A., and Japan, by the 19th century. Mass production of goods became the hallmark of industrialized societies. By the mid 19th century, many big corporations joined together to control trade.
High agricultural productivity in Great Britain in Western Europe, Japan, and the Yangzi Delta in China led to significant population growth. Occupational specialization was encouraged by the high population densities, which led to people working in occupations other than agriculture. The commercially sophisticated economies ran into ecological difficulties like deforestation and soil depletion.

Coal played a very important role in the industrialization of Great Britain. Wood was the primary source of fuel for home heating, cooking, and iron production until the mid 18th century. This led to serious wood shortage in Great Britain. Luckily Great Britain was sitting on top of western Europe's largest coal deposits. The coal supported iron production and the mining industry, and fueled steam engines. The Americas provided resources to Europe which gave Great Britain additional ecological relief. Almost one half of the profits from sugar exports paid for imports of manufactured goods form Europe. Cotton became very popular in Great Britain because it is lighter and easier to wash and quicker to dry than wool. Wool producers in Britain convinced Parliament to pass the Calico Acts of 1720 and 1721 which prohibited imports of printed cotton cloth and restricted the sale of calicoes at home because they felt threatened by the growing popularity of cotton. Parliament even passed a law requiring corpses to buried in wool, but consumer demand for cotton products drove the development of a British cotton textile industry anyway. (DZ)

Mechanization of the Cotton Industry(CT)
Demand for cotton was so high that the producers of cotton had to speed up production to supply for the growing domestic and foreign markets. The producers of cotton turned to inventions that rapidly produced more cotton for the cotton industry. In the 1730s artisans developed labor- saving devices for spinning and weaving cotton because they used hand techniques derived from the wood and linen industries. The first important breakthrough came in 1733 when a guy who was a Manchester mechanic named John Kay invented the flying shuttle, which sped up weaving process and stimulated demand for thread. In 1779 Samuel Crompton built a mule which helped spin cotton, it produced a strong and fine thread while working fast. A worker using a steam driven mule could produce 100 more times thread than a worker using a manual spinning wheel. In 1785 Edmund Cartwright patented a water driven power loom that inaugurated an era of mechanical weaving. Within two decades steam moved the power loom, and by the 1820s it had largely supplanted hand weavers in the cotton industry. In 1765 James Watt made the most crucial breakthrough of this era by making the steam engine. This version relied on steam to force a piston to turn a wheel, whose rotary motion converted a simple pump into an engine that had multiple uses. Innovation did not stop with cotton production and steam engines. After 1709 British smelters began to use coke (a purified form form of coal) rather than more expensive charcoal as a fuel to produce iron. As a result British iron production skyrocketed during the eighteenth century, while prices to consumers fell. The 19th century was as age of steel rather than iron. Steel is much harder, stronger, and more resilient than iron, but until the nineteenth century it was very expensive to produce. James Watt's steam engine did not adapt well to transportation uses because it consumed too much coal. After his patent expired, however, inventors devised high- pressure engines that required less fuel. They had the capacity to carry huge cargoes, so railroads and steamships lowered transportation costs. Steamships proved their own versatility by advancing up rivers to points that sailboats could not reach because of inconvenient twists, turns, or wheels.(CT)

Five Themes:

Interaction Between Humans and the Environment:
Great Britain cut down trees and used them as their primary source of fuel, which lead to problems with the environment as trees became scarce. They later started to mine coal for energy.(DZ)
Development and Interaction of Cultures:

State-Building, Expansion, and Conflict:

Creation, Expansion, and Interaction of Economic Systems:

Development and Transformation of Social Structures: